April 2013: Mrs Molesworth's "The Cuckoo Clock" and our next meeting

We finally took on Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock (1877) this month, having put it on our Books We Must Get Round To list at our very first meeting two years ago.  It was the book that established Mrs Molesworth (1839-1921) as a leading children's author, and a prolific one too - the Enid Blyton of her day, perhaps.  By the time of her death in her early 80s she had produced over a hundred books, sometimes writing as many as seven in a year.  Below is a picture of author Rosemary Sutcliff's own copy of The Cuckoo Clock, sitting on the shelf in her library.

Mary Louisa Molesworth was born in 1839 in Rotterdam where her Scottish father, Charles Stewart, worked as a shipping agent.  The growing family soon returned to England and settled in Manchester, eventually moving to Whalley Range (then a select middle class suburb on the outskirts of the city).  As a teenager, Mary Louisa attended classes given by Reverend William Gaskell, husband of the famous industrial novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell.  She also spent a year in Switzerland, studying French.

In 1861 Mary Louisa married well: to Captain Richard Molesworth, nephew of the 7th Viscount Molesworth.  The couple lost two of their children in close succession in 1869, but five others survived into adulthood.  Mrs Molesworth published her first novel in 1870, and her first children's book, Tell Me A Story, was published in 1875.  The marriage was an unhappy one and ended in legal separation in 1879, by which time Mrs Molesworth was an established author.  Her admirers included the poet Swinburne, who wrote: "Any chapter of The Cuckoo Clock is worth a shoal of the very best novels dealing with the characters and fortunes of mere adults."

In The Cuckoo Clock young Griselda is taken to stay with her very old maiden aunts who live with a very old servant in a very old house - reminiscent of Lucy Boston's The House at Green Knowe.  We don't know why she's there, but she's lonely and bored and she's required to be good.  There is something of Katy in What Katy Did about her.  She strikes up a friendship with a magical cuckoo in a clock, who takes her on various gentle adventures.  Eventually she makes friends with a real child: a  boy called Philip, and the cuckoo tactfully flies back to his clock (which turns out to have been made by Griselda's grandfather).

Mrs Molesworth often wrote about lonely children finding friends with magical help.  Her  cuckoo is strict, sharp and quick to chastise.  Using animals as bossy teachers and guides is a familiar technique amongst many of our favourite children's authors - C S Lewis adopted it in his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), as did E Nesbit, whose Psammead (Five Children and It, 1902) was frequently acid-tongued, but Mrs Molesworth's overly-didactic and moralistic approach does become rather heavy-handed by contrast.

Overall, we felt that The Cuckoo Clock was an interesting historic piece, but insipid: Alice without Lewis Carroll's originality.  There were some charming ideas (a nightdress decorated with real butterflies and scented drops of dew for refreshment, for example), but the story didn't make any great progress, the adventures were lacking in punch, and the author was at times frustratingly lazy ("This wonderful thing happened but I can't explain it").  It did bring to mind other more pleasurable books: the Mrs Pepperpot series (Alf Proysen, 1956 onwards) and The Faraway Tree series (Enid Blyton, 1939-1951) were both mentioned, as was The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911).

Maybe we'd enjoy one of Mrs Molesworth's many other books more (The Tapestry Room, 1879, perhaps, or The Carved Lions, 1895).  As to her reputation as "the Jane Austen of the nursery": on this one reading it doesn't seem to be justified.  The advantages of the e-book generation come to the fore here; no financial outlay is required to give more of her books a try as many are freely downloadable.

Our next meeting is on Wednesday 8 May 2013, when we will be talking about Alan Garner's 1967 Carnegie-winning fantasy, The Owl Service, named in 2007 as one of the top ten Carnegie-winners of all time.

July 2012: E Nesbit's "Treasure Seekers" and our September book

We met in July to share the hugely enjoyable adventures of Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and Horace Octavius (HO) Bastable, as they tried to find the means to restore their family's fortunes in E Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers (1899).

A socialist and a founder of the Fabians, Nesbit led a notoriously complex personal life, but it was her need for money to support her family which encouraged her to publish children's stories, and the echoes of her real-life "treasure seeking" resonate through her fiction.  Writing with an eye to the Sunday-school sensibilities of her Victorian audience, she nevertheless managed to deploy knowingly subversive humour, social observation and some biting sarcasm.  The first person narrative voice is unusual for its time, and solving the "mystery" of who is telling the stories is all part of the fun.

The children come from that lost era before television, computer games and manufactured entertainment intervened, and reading about their imaginative games and amusements is a joy.  Much of their charm is in their innocence, while their wild inspirations for how to set about making money are frequently drawn from classic literature; stories which were so familiar to Nesbit's readers at the time.  They have an occasionally antiquated turn of phrase too: referring to their “ancestral home” for example.

We laughed out loud at some of the adventures – and the adults’ reactions to their attempts to sell Oloroso sherry, to develop medicines, and to edit their own newspaper which included some Sensible Advice (“It takes four hours and a quarter now to get to Manchester from London; but I should not think anyone would if they could help it.”).

There are some uncomfortable moments for 21st century readers with modern sensibilities: the children can be unkindly judgmental of others such as Albert-next-door with his frilly collars and knickerbockers (an early version of Violet Elizabeth Bott); there is some semitic stereotyping and the word "nigger" - common 19th century parlance - makes an appearance.  (We always try to read original editions of the books we select, and while we are unsurprised to read words or descriptions that are unacceptable nowadays, they are often unsettling when they appear.)

We talked about the role of the pet dog in children’s literature – from the Bastable’s partner in crime, Pincher, to the almost-human Timmy in the Famous Five; we discussed the structures of fictional families – often four, five or more children with twins not uncommon, all trying hard to be good but so often failing, while a previously deceased mother or father causes the remaining parent to be largely absent, hard working to the point of exhaustion and much loved.  The Bastable children benefit from the kindly intervention of Albert-next-door’s rather mysterious uncle – we felt that there was another story here ripe for the telling.

We were able to examine some E Nesbit first editions from Bath Library’s archives, while we were recommended to read A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book for its closely related echoes of the Nesbit family’s chaotic lives.

We are taking a holiday in August and meeting again on 5 September when our next book will be Erich Kastner's iconic Emil and the Detectives (1929), set in pre-WW2 Berlin and translated from the original German.

June 2012: Tove Jansson's "Moominland Midwinter" and "The Summer Book", and our July book

We spent June in Finland: first we visited the dark and wintry northern forests with the Moomins, before travelling on to explore an island in the Gulf of Finland during a long light summer.  Our books were Tove Jansson's charmingly eccentric Moominland Midwinter (1957), together with her semi-autobiographical story The Summer Book (1972).

Several of us knew and loved the Moomins and were delighted to have a chance to return to them; for others amongst us they were entirely new, and rather strange - even confusing - and unlike any other children's book we have known!  But the story grabs you and pulls you in: in the end it doesn't matter that you don't know who the characters are: you just begin to accept them.  The story of young Moomintroll waking early from hibernation and discovering an unfamiliar and rather frightening world going on around  the sleeping Moomins gives children the opportunity to share in his fears, before retreating to the safety of Moominmamma's comforting, dreamy presence.

The illustrations that bring the Moomins to life are so important, and Jansson's artistic heritage and talent shine through on every page.  

As a companion piece, The Summer Book is fascinating.  It reinforces Jansson's ability to capture the most powerful personality traits and re-cast them so that they are immediately recognisable, either as Moomins or as the humans on the island.  The grumpy grandmother and her relationship with her perky grand-daughter was brilliantly described, and the story encompassed melancholy, hope and innocence as well as some savagery.  Neither was Jansson afraid to address impending (arguably actual) death - as she had done in Moominland Midwinter with the story of the squirrel who appears to freeze to death.  

The Moomins offer serious writing for children - the books don't talk down or mollycoddle.  But Jansson also offers a safety net if the anxiety gets too much - if children are worried about the squirrel they can turn to a later page to discover it alive and well!   The same safe haven is not available to readers of  The Summer Book.

The "foreign-ness" of both books is quite striking for native English readers - also true of the illustrations.  The independent Little My in Moominland Midwinter was particularly admired.  To those who have never experienced truly deep and dark northern winters, it is clear that the climate was clearly of enormous influence and importance to Jansson - waiting for spring to arrive assumed a significance that was quite new to us; Moomintroll celebrating the coming of the new sun with golden ribbons in his ears was utterly charming.

Jansson teaches us to prepare for winter and to prepare for death - it's a certainty that both will come in the end.

Our next book is E Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers: being the adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune (1899).  Sadly, in a sign of the times, the library service in Bath & North East Somerset no longer keeps sufficient copies to supply our book group - luckily, several of us have our own copies that we can use instead!